The 25 Best Jobs For Work-Life Balance

Trending News: The Best Jobs For People Who Want To Have A Life Outside Of Work

Why Is This Important?

Because working hard is pointless if you can’t enjoy the fruits of your labor.

Long Story Short

Employer rating site Glassdoor just released their list of the 25 best jobs for work-life balance. Based on employee surveys, soft-skills jobs tend to be more worker friendly, while technical positions round out the bottom.

Long Story

“Work-life balance” is pretty much what it sounds like — striking a balance between work and your personal life when both demand the bulk of your time. It’s likely a leftover vestige of the early labor union movements, when people fought to (among other things) whittle the average work week down to something other than “soul-crushing and/or actually lethal.” It’s one of the hottest employment topics of the 21st century, and often one of the top benefits touted by companies looking to attract talent. “Work here, and you can stop working, sometimes (though it won’t feel like it!” It’s sad that this is considered a “benefit” at all, but this is the world we live in, so to that end employment analytics site Glassdoor has released their list of the 25 best jobs for work-life balance.

The results are based on survey data, where employees rated their work-life balance experience on a scale of 1-5, with 1 being “very dissatisfied” and 5 being “very satisfied.” Here’s what the top 10 looks like.

When you attempt to draw conclusions, it’s difficult because the methodology is kind of flawed from the start. For one, it doesn’t make a ton of sense to survey work-life balance satisfaction across job titles, because job titles are notoriously difficult to align based on actual responsibilities. For example, a “Social Media Manager” at a small startup or restaurant may just be some kid who tweets, while the same title at a Fortune 500 company may be a legitimate data analyst who also happens to post to Facebook. Also (and more importantly), work-life balance is as much a result of company culture as it is the nature of a position. Sure, a systems admin is always going to work more hours than a customer service rep, but you can bet that systems admin is getting squeezed a lot harder at a Silicon Valley tech firm than he is at a consulting firm where his department is basically back office tech support.

That said, there are still conclusions to be made. Generally speaking, if you want to get paid, don’t expect to have exceptional work-life balance. The mean salary for the top 5 jobs is $57,674. The median (which eliminates the influence of both the Data Scientist’s extremely high salary and the Substitute Teacher’s extremely low one) is just $45,720. Compare that with the bottom 5 jobs (Front End Developer, Software Developer, Lab Assistant, Solutions Engineer and Content Manager). Their mean salary is nearly $10k higher at $67,139. The median (discounting the lowly Lab Assistant) is a robust $75,000.

The other thing we learn is that having a technical background is the path to both better pay and longer hours. Aside from the Data Scientist, the top 10 jobs for work-life balance are either based on “soft skills,” or at least on the artsier end of the tech spectrum. The word analyst doesn’t appear once, yet it’s in 4 of the bottom 15 job titles. The lesson is that those STEM kids in college really do know what’s up when it comes to their future earnings, but us liberal arts layabouts can take some comfort in the fact that they’ll at least have to work for that fat tech paycheck.

With the omnipresence of always-on communication technology, work-life balance is becoming an ever more delicate thing to manage. Long ago, economists predicted that we’d hardly be working at all by this point in history, so it’s somewhat sad to see that this is such a hot-button issue. Still, it beats 12-hour days in the coal mines.

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Ask The Big Question

What’s the most important factor in determining work-life balance.

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This is why my company cell phone goes to airplane mode as soon as I leave the building.

Drop This Fact

By Glassdoor’s metrics, work-life balance has actually been on the decline. Time to bring back labor unions.